Chiral polar textures probed with resonant X-ray diffraction

ORAL

Abstract

The formation of non-uniform polar vortices and skyrmions in complex oxide heterostructures opens up many intriguing areas of study, such as chirality, negative capacitance, collective dynamics, and topological phase transitions. Because these are inherently dependent on the 3-dimensional nature of such polar textures, a complete picture of the nanoscale structure is required. A lot can be gained from hard X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy studies, but resonant soft X-ray diffraction coupled with circular dichroism can give additional insights. Combining soft X-ray reciprocal space scans, circular dichroism, and scattering calculations, our picture of the 3-dimensional structures can be refined. I will discuss the non-uniform polar vortices and skyrmions that occur in (PbTiO3)/(SrTiO3) heterostructures, and how scattering studies at the Ti L-edges can be used to understand their 3-dimensional, chiral structures.

*This work was supported by the Quantum Materials program of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, US Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231).

–

Presenters

  • Margaret McCarter

    • University of California, Berkeley

Authors

  • Margaret McCarter

    • University of California, Berkeley

  • Christoph Klewe

    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Elizabeth P. Donoway

    • University of California, Berkeley

  • Sujit Das

    • University of California, Berkeley
    • University of California Berkeley
    • UC Berkeley

  • Vladimir A Stoica

    • Pennsylvania State University
    • Argonne National Laboratory
    • Department of Physics, University of Michigan

  • Dong Ryeol Lee

    • Soongsil University

  • John Freeland

    • argonne national laboratory
    • Argonne National Laboratory
    • Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory
    • Argonne National Laboratory, Advanced Photon Source
    • Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA

  • Padraic Shafer

    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Gerrit Van der Laan

    • Diamond Light Source
    • Diamond Light Source Ltd

  • Ramamoorthy Ramesh

    • materials science and engineering, university of california berkeley
    • University of California, Berkeley
    • University of California Berkeley
    • UC Berkeley
    • Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkley